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Last week I skipped ahead in my "What to Freak Out About When You Are Expecting" book to the section on lactation. There in black and white is a hand-drawn picture of a woman hooked up to an electronic double pump. There's a reason many women say the device makes them feel like cows: As Lepore points out, bovine milking machines are cited in patents for breast-pump designs. To add to this private humiliation, breast milk may not be the "magic elixir" it's cracked up to be.

So it was with great interest that, during one of my regular bouts of third-trimester wakefulness at 3:00 a.m., I read Hanna Rosin's article in the April issue of The Atlantic, "The Case Against Breast-feeding." Rosin says she "dutifully" breast-fed her first two children for the recommended full year. But with her third child, competing demands of home and work made the task seem like a "prison." In an apparent attempt to justify her new maternal ambivalence, she digs into the few scientific studies that exist on the subject to show that the much-touted health benefits are minimal. The real benefit from breast-feeding may have less to do with the milk and more to do with the mother-child bonding time.

Judith Warner at The New York Times has entered the fray, and is seconding the motion for a ban on breast pumps. "Why, as a society, have we privileged the magic elixir of maternal milk over actual maternal contact, denying the vast, vast majority of mothers the kind of extended maternity leave that would make them physically present for their babies?" she asks. "Why do we, as women, accept all the guilt and pressure about breast-feeding that comes our way instead of standing up for what we need in order, in the broadest possible sense, to nourish and sustain ourselves and our families?"

I agree: Fixating on the breast vs. bottle divide is unproductive for women. But I suspect that a ban on breast pumps will not force the issue on extended maternity leave; it will merely reduce the choice to breast or formula. The breast pump is not the bad guy here. If you need a technological bogey man, the bottle — whether filled with breast milk or formula — renders the mother's nourishing role as portable. But, really, is this where women want to take the debate? At some level, don't breast pumps increase choices and flexibility for women? I thought the point of the women's movement — and modern-day motherhood in particular — was to increase choices as wide and varied as the paraphernalia in those cavernous children's warehouse stores. Maternity leave is a worthy battle, but the breast vs. bottle vs. pump skirmish should be left out of it.

And here's where the personal becomes spiritual: I know breast-feeding doesn't work for everyone, but I am planning to give it a try. For me, breast-feeding is not about asserting my body as a site of workplace discrimination protest or reclaiming my body from the patriarchal medical establishment. For me, it's about worshiping God with the gift of my body, which he amazingly and intricately designed to nurture and nourish new life. Now, if we could just figure out how to do this without forgetting to nurture and nourish the variety of women's vocational callings, as well.

Christine Gardner is assistant professor of rhetoric and culture in the communication department at Wheaton College. She is working on a book about evangelical sexual-abstinence campaigns, and will be writing for the new CT women's blog, Her.meneutics.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

LaVonne Neff also wrote about breast-feeding on the women's blog.

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April (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53